Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  She picked it up and then froze. “Oh, damn,” she said and practically threw it down. “Oh, no—I didn’t.” She put one arm across her stomach. “Oh, Jesus, I did. Oh, God, I’m so stupid. How could I be so Goddamned stupid?”

  “Sophie—” I started and then cut off. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “My God, honey, don’t cry.”

  “I’m full. No, it’s worse—I’m stuffed.”

  “Sophie, don’t—”

  “That’s what you should have said to me before, when I was stuffing my face,” she said, hotly. “‘Sophie, don’t.’ A true friend would have.”

  The people at the adjoining tables were staring at us. I ignored them. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “The world weeps.” She sat up straighter and took a deep breath. “Right. At least I know what to do about it.” She got up.

  “Wait,” I said, reaching over and grabbing her wrist. “Where are you going?”

  Her mouth tightened into a hard colorless line before she twisted out of my grip and headed toward the ladies room. Because I was tipsy, it took me a little time to get it. Then I went stumbling across the brasserie after her but by the time I got there, she was finishing up.

  “How could you do that?” I asked her as she came out of the stall, her face all red and sweaty.

  “Finger down the throat, how do you think?” she said hoarsely, splashing water on her face from the sink. “It works.” She drank from her cupped hands, swished the water around in her mouth and spat it out with a grunt.

  “But you’re not an adolescent girl, you’re—what, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?”

  “Twenty-nine next month, actually.” She splashed more water on her face and then straightened up to look at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot.

  “That’s way too old for bulimia, Sophie.”

  She shut off the faucet and patted her face dry with a paper towel. “It’s way too old for a whole lot of things, Lee. I’m fighting for my survival.”

  “Keep doing that shit and you’ll lose,” I said.

  “Thanks for your support.” She took a deep breath and let it out, putting her arm across her stomach again. “Empty. It’s all right. I never should have done this but I’m going to be all right.”

  “Sophie—”

  “Oh, shut up, Lee,” she snapped. “This soul selects her own society and it’s not you. Got that? Obtrude on someone else and stay the fuck away from me.” She yanked open the door and left.

  I started to go after her but the hostess intercepted me politely but firmly to make sure I wasn’t trying to skip out on the bill. By the time I got outside, Sophie was nowhere to be seen. I went back to where we had left her manager but there was no trace of either of them. Even the pedestal was gone.

  I stayed away from Covent Garden for over a week after that. When I finally did go back, I wasn’t even sure that Sophie would be there anymore. Maybe the creep had packed her duffle bag for her and taken her away. I couldn’t decide whether I was afraid I’d never see her again or hoping I wouldn’t. But when I came out of the tube station, I knew Sophie was still there even before I spotted the bronze Amazon. The crowd was even larger and quieter than before.

  This time, there were still a few other statues trying for attention—the weather was good and the tourists were out in force, enough to support a whole flock of statues, buskers, Big Issue vendors, and plain old beggars. But once again, Sophie had the lion’s share.

  “Oi. Oi, you.”

  Something landed on my shoulder; it was Raggedy Andrew’s blue ballet slipper, with his foot still in it. He was balanced on his other leg on a barrel painted to look like a very tall toy drum. It was a nice effect. No one was looking. He broke pose and sat down on the barrel. “You used to help out Miss Superstar over there.” He jerked his chin in Sophie’s direction.

  “Not anymore.”

  The red yarn bobbed as he nodded his head. “Yeah, I know. You ain’t been around lately so I guess the friendship’s off between you two. You got no pull with her or anything, right?”

  I spread my hands. “Why? Is there something you want?”

  “Yeah. I want her to get the fuck outta here. We all do.” He gestured at the other human statues.

  I looked from him to Sophie’s bronze form—even at a distance, that stillness was apparent. “I guess I can understand that.”

  Raggedy Andy gave a short, unpleasant laugh. “You think it’s because she’s getting all the money and attention. That’s only part of it. But not all of it, or even most of it.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “So what is?”

  “Stick around for a while, till she takes her break. You’ll see then. They won’t—the punters, I mean. I don’t know why, but they don’t. But us, we do.” He waved at the other statues again. “I’m betting you will, too.”

  On the face of it, the idea that a grown man dressed as a rag-doll could scare me in broad daylight was laughable. But I wasn’t laughing and neither was he. A chill went through me deep inside, where the warm sun couldn’t reach. I turned away from him and started moving through the crowd again.

  I didn’t have to get that close to her to see that Sophie’s body had gone from enviable to virtually perfect. Her muscle definition was better than I had ever seen on her or, for that matter, anyone else. But there was something strange about it, too. It was the kind of definition that wouldn’t be apparent unless she were flexing and holding the pose like a bodybuilder, purposely displaying the muscles, and I knew she wasn’t. A flexing pose would have shown off one set of muscles—arms or legs, back or stomach. Whereas Sophie’s entire body was … well, an aerobics instructor would have wept at the sight of such an impossible ideal.

  I heard the quiet snick of a camera shutter. The guy next to me was holding an elaborate digital SLR with an equally elaborate lens.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but does that thing zoom in?”

  It did. He took a close-up of Sophie and then showed me the image on the small screen on the back of the camera.

  “I can’t really see her face in any detail,” I told him apologetically. “Would you mind terribly letting me look through the lens?”

  He hesitated, then decided that I wasn’t going to try to run off with it. He showed me which buttons to press and slipped the strap over my head; I put my eye to the viewfinder.

  The zoom went so fast that it took a moment for the focus to catch up with it and when it did, I wasn’t sure I had aimed it at the right target. It seemed to be Sophie’s face but the eyes were blank. Just blank featureless bronze. Like a statue’s.

  Shocked, I fumbled the camera; if the owner hadn’t taken the precaution of putting the strap around my neck, I would have dropped it. Not trusting myself to handle it, I motioned for him to take it back and he did so, looking more than a little bemused.

  As soon as it was around his neck again, I felt like a complete ass. I had glimpsed Sophie’s face for barely a second and her head had been tilted slightly forward. If I had let my own middle-aged eyes adjust, I surely would have seen there was nothing wrong with hers. Should have followed my earlier impulse and gone home, I thought as I started working my way toward the front of the crowd. I didn’t need to get up close and see whether her eyes were really blank or not. I already knew I’d imagined it, and I kept going anyway.

  This time, I was twenty feet away from her when her stillness cracked. I froze where I was, thinking that I had done it again. But no, this was just her taking a break, like Raggedy Andy had said.

  Or rather, it was her creepy manager telling her to take a break. I could see his hand resting on the back of her left calf, signaling her as if she were a trained dog. I felt a surge of anger that he would treat her like that.

  Sophie seemed to shrink and fold in on herself, practically collapsing as she climbed down from the pedestal and disappeared behind the dispersing crowd. I got more than a few dirty looks as I forced my way through the people milling around i
n front of me. I had the strange feeling that they had all forgotten they’d just been staring at Sophie’s bronze Amazon; like they’d been released from a trance with the command to remember nothing.

  When I finally reached the pedestal, I thought Sophie had left, spirited away by her manager just like the night I had taken her to the brasserie. But that was ridiculous—no one could have gotten away so quickly with so many people clogging up every available walkway. I went over to where she had left her duffel bag the last time, then to the pillar where her creepy manager had appeared out of nowhere—nothing. People bumped into me on all sides as they passed, the crowd growing thicker and everyone in it apparently in a hurry; I started to feel a little unsteady, even disoriented.

  And suddenly there she was, right next to her pedestal. She was wearing a loose-fitting robe printed with abstract shapes in various metallic browns and golds that complemented her body paint in such a way that it made her seem somehow indistinct. A trick of light and color?

  “Sophie,” I called. “Do you have a moment?”

  Shoulders sagging, she turned away from me.

  “Please, wait—” I rushed over to her and then stopped short, not just because her creepy manager appeared seemingly out of nowhere but at the sight of her face, close up. “Sophie?” I asked, suddenly unsure if it really was her.

  Her face had the haunted, suffering look of someone who had been enduring years of torment and was now deteriorating under the strain. “Oh, Jesus, Sophie,” I said. “What happened to you?”

  “Leave me alone,” she said dully, waving me off. I grabbed her arm.

  “No, Sophie, talk to me! What the hell?”

  She tried to pull away but I hung on to her. Her arm felt even worse than her face looked—the muscles were soft, practically limp, as if they had atrophied, while the bone underneath was oddly light, like it might have been hollow.

  “I told you, leave me alone,” she growled, pushing at me. I managed to get hold of her robe and tore it open.

  This could not have been the body that I had seen posing on that pedestal, I thought, staring in shock. There wasn’t much flesh and what there was hung in loose little folds. Her midsection was abnormally concave, as if most of it had actually been removed, while her legs were little more than sticks. This could not have been the body that I had seen posing on that pedestal—and more than that, this could not have happened to her in the space of a week.

  “Sophie, what did you do to yourself?” My gaze moved from her to the creep, who was standing beside her with a ghost of a smile on his evil face. “What did you do to her?”

  He put his arm around her shoulders and closed up her robe.

  “Sophie, please talk to me.” I reached for her again but somehow he slipped her around to his other side and put himself between us.

  “She told you to leave her alone,” he said in a low, oily voice. “And now I’m telling you.” Before I could answer, he turned Sophie and himself away from me and in the next moment, they were just gone, melting into the Covent Garden crowd of tourists without a trace.

  I looked around and saw that the pedestal had disappeared as well.

  “Certain things are impossible,” said Raggedy Andy over a pint. “You can tell yourself this. You can learn it in school or by experience or both. Then they’ll happen anyway and you won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

  The toy soldier toasted that statement with a bottle of Beck’s. “Right.”

  They weren’t Raggedy Andy and the toy soldier anymore, of course. Raggedy Andy was now a ginger-haired, green-eyed fellow named Liam who was a few years older under the whiteface than I had estimated. The toy soldier was a very tall woman named Pauline whose olive features had a strangely ageless quality; she might have been seventeen or forty. I was sitting with them in a pub near the tube station.

  “Maybe that’s what ‘impossible’ really means,” Pauline added. “Impossible to do anything about.”

  “You think it’s impossible for me to help my friend?” I asked.

  Liam gave a short hard laugh. “You saw her. That’s what’s happened to her in a week. Can you honestly believe she’s not beyond help?”

  “What do you know about it?” I said. The words came out sounding defensive but at the same time, it was an honest question. “Do you know that guy she’s with? Do you know anything about him?”

  “No.” He took a healthy gulp from the pint. “Not really.” His eyes swiveled to Pauline in the chair beside him. She looked away.

  I sat up straighter and grabbed his glass away from him. “Oh? What don’t you really know?”

  “Nothing to speak of,” the other woman said, giving me an appalled look as she transferred her Beck’s to the hand farther away from me. “Really. Liam doesn’t know him and neither do I.”

  “No one does,” Liam added in response to my skeptical look. “Nobody knows his name or where he comes from, who he works for if he works for anyone at all. And anyone who does know ain’t talking. Like your friend.” He reached for his glass; I held it away from him.

  “When was the first time you saw this guy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said irritably. “I see a few thousand people every day. After a while some faces get familiar but I couldn’t tell you when I first saw most of them.” He reached for the glass again but I still refused to give it to him. “And holding the last of my pint hostage isn’t gonna improve my memory any. I can buy another.” He started to get up; I waved him down and gave him back his glass.

  “Did you ever see him do this with anyone else?” I asked.

  Liam frowned thoughtfully. “No. But you hear things.”

  “No, you hear things,” I corrected him. “So what have you heard?”

  He looked at the woman again; she shrugged. “It was very vague. Something about a garden.”

  “Ah.” I gave a harsh, humorless laugh. “Wait, don’t tell me—could it be, oh, Covent Garden?”

  “No, actually it wasn’t,” she said coolly. “Somewhere south of the river.”

  “Oh, yeah. That would be New Covent Garden, then.” I made a disgusted noise. “Who do you think you’re talking to, some clueless fuck of a tourist?”

  They looked at each other, then got up and walked off. I slumped, resting my elbow on the table and staring at my own pint. Guinness Extra Cold; I couldn’t remember whether it was my second or third. Or fourth? I was losing track and if I kept on, I was going to lose consciousness as well.

  “Not New Covent Garden, either.”

  I jumped as the woman plopped down in the chair next to me.

  “It’s not any public place. A regular garden,” she went on, “as in the place behind somebody’s private residence.”

  “That’s it?”

  She tilted her head thoughtfully. “I got the impression it was a big garden. Big garden behind a big house. Posh, lots of money.”

  “Wouldn’t it belong to someone pretty well known, then?” I asked.

  Pauline blinked at me. “Why?”

  “Because that’s how it seems to go in this country. If you’re posh, you’re famous.”

  Now she smiled faintly. “There’s posh and then there’s posh—too posh for lower life-forms like us to know anything about. Do you know all the very high-and-mighty in America, the rarefied elite?”

  “No, but this is a much smaller country. Fewer people to keep track of.”

  She moved my pint away from me and pushed something else into its place. “Here. You need this.”

  I found myself staring at a large cup of coffee. There was no milk in it but I gulped it down anyway.

  “Can’t hold your liquor at all, can you?”

  I shrugged. “On the other hand, I have the smallest bar bill in the country.”

  “All that means is you drink alone. A lot.”

  “That may be true,” I said with another sigh, “but it’s rather unkind to point it out. Isn’t it?” I closed my eyes and waited for her
response; nothing. “Well, isn’t it?”

  I opened my eyes. There was no one in the chair next to me.

  I pulled myself together enough to gulp down another cup of coffee, even though I knew the whole sober-up-with-lots-of-coffee thing was just a myth. If I couldn’t actually get sober, I would settle for drunk and wide awake. It would save me some time and trouble if I didn’t fall asleep going home on the tube. Going home was really all I was thinking about when I finally stepped out of the pub. Then I saw the crowd and headed straight down to join it.

  Sophie had changed into the silver lady and the persona was a lot different than the time I had last seen it. Now she wore as little as the bronze Amazon—no, less. Her breasts were barely covered, and I wasn’t sure what she was wearing on the bottom, but it looked like a modified doily, and a very small one at that.

  Her body, however, had changed even more—i.e., it was better, if better was really the word to describe it. The impossible ideal of the bronze Amazon had somehow been surpassed. The silver lady’s muscles were sleeker and better defined, her posture was so precise that she even looked taller. No, not just taller, but larger all the way around—

  That couldn’t be Sophie, I thought, goggling at her. There was a very strong resemblance but it wasn’t her. This had to be someone else entirely, a bigger woman who was doing a variation on Sophie’s silver lady. The creep manager’s idea, no doubt. He probably had a whole stable of “clients” and made them trade off their costumes and personae all the time, just to make sure they knew who was boss.

  After a bit, I realized she was moving; very, very slowly, all but imperceptibly, like the minute-hand on an old-fashioned clock, she was changing position. At the same time, I had the distinct impression of her figure hardening, become more statuelike rather than less. Her hands, held close together at waist level, began to descend, moving away from each other to the tops of her thighs; her head lifted, turned toward me as her weight shifted from one leg to the other.